A Chilean architect who has focused his career on building low-cost social housing and reconstructing cities after natural disasters has been named the winner of architecture’s highest prize, the Pritzker.

The architect, Alejandro Aravena, from Santiago, received the honour at a time when Chile’s architects have been recognised for designing distinctive buildings with regional materials.

They include Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, who won the Silver Lion award at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, and Smiljan Radic, who designed the annual pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery, both in 2014.

Aravena’s built work “gives economic opportunity to the less privileged, mitigates the effects of natural disasters, reduces energy consumption and provides welcoming public space,” Tom Pritzker, chairman and president of the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the prize, said in a statement.

“Innovative and inspiring, he shows how architecture at its best can improve people’s lives.”

Indeed, Aravena, 48, in an interview described his architecture as being fuelled more by public service than by aesthetic design. While many architects aim to create iconic buildings, Aravena said he was mostly concerned with the underlying purpose of a project.

Monterrey Housing, 2010, Monterrey, Mexico. Photo: ELEMENTAL.

“Sometimes the solution to the forces at play is an economic building; sometimes you need to focus people’s imagination with architecture,” he said, adding that the challenge is “to analyse in a coldblooded way what particular equation is required.”

He continued: “The success, in conventional terms, is less guaranteed – you have less control over the project. But that’s thinking in artistic terms, if you consider your building a piece of art.”

Although Aravena may not be a household name, he is well-known in the architecture profession – he is the director of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and a former member of the Pritzker Prize jury. He was also a speaker at TEDGlobal in Rio de Janeiro, in 2014.

Aravena’s firm, Elemental, which is based in Santiago, has become known for social housing and for a participatory design-build process it calls “half of a good house.” That process allows residents of a community to complete the work themselves over time, thereby raising their own standard of living.

This incremental housing approach, as it is known, allows for building on more expensive land that is closer to economic opportunities and gives residents a personal stake in the outcome.

“We transform the lack of resources into a principle of incrementality,” he said. “Let’s do now what is more difficult. Let families take care of the rest through their own means.”

The firm developed this innovation in northern Chile in 2003, building housing for 100 families with just $7,500 per family in government subsidies to cover the land and construction. For inspiration, he drew on favelas and slums and worked with the families to build smaller houses they could later enlarge.

He applied this same approach in 2010 when, after Chile’s earthquake and tsunami, Elemental was given 100 days to come up with a master plan for the city of Constitución — including infrastructure, public space and buildings — by working directly with the population on how to best meet its needs.

“We asked the community to identify not the answer but what was the question,” he said. This, it turned out, was how to manage rainfall, so the firm designed a forest that could help prevent flooding.

“What we’ve been trying to do is communicate that architecture, instead of an extra cost, is an added value,” Aravena said. “We would like to apply our talent — our knowledge — to challenges that affect the majority of the population.”

The firm has also designed public buildings, including several for Aravena’s alma mater, the Universidad Católica de Chile: a mathematics school (1998), medical school (2001), a renovation of the architecture school (2004), Siamese Towers (2005) and the U.C. Innovation Center — Anacleto Angelini (2014).

His office building for the health care company Novartis in Shanghai is currently under construction. And Aravena has designed dormitories in the United States: at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas (in 2008).

Villa Verde Housing, 2013, Constitución, Chile. Photo: ELEMENTAL.

His buildings are often distinguished by local materials and relatively simple forms. They do not necessarily arrest attention or grab headlines, but Aravena said he did not aim to establish a visual signature, nor does he worry about becoming wealthy and famous.

“Human life is so much richer than money,” he said.

Aravena’s unorthodox approach started with his unconventional introduction to the profession in the late 1980s, the final years of Augusto Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship, when there was little information publicly available.

In 2000, as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Aravena was part of an academic initiative that inquired, “What does it mean to redefine quality in social architecture?” He soon realised “we had to create a company to go beyond the academic realm.”

A year later, Aravena and Andrés Iacobelli — a transport engineer who has since gone his own way — started Elemental, a so-called do tank (as opposed to a think tank) that focuses on projects of public interest and social impact.

The mandate, Aravena said, was, “Let’s make a company that is able to prove that things can be better.

“If we believe we’re good designers, why not try to apply our skills to issues that matter?” he added. “Social housing is a difficult question and it deserves professional quality, not professional charity.”

While such socially conscious work is often done in the margins of a firm, Aravena said he approaches it as the primary focus, worthy of top talent’s attention. “We need the best people in the entire chain of production,” he said, “from the politicians to the social worker to the designer.”

Mr. Arevena’s current partners in Elemental are all former students: Gonzalo Arteaga, Juan Cerda, Víctor Oddó, and Diego Torres. “Architecture is a collective discipline,” he said.

Aravena said he was also content to continue working in the relative obscurity of Chile, with its population of about 18 million.

“We’re very OK to be here in the corner of the world,” he said. “We can concentrate and produce and we’re not missing anything.”

He said he was particularly proud to be working in the country at a time of critical mass in quality architecture. In Chile, “I could name maybe 10 architects ??? and 10 is quite a lot ??? that you look at what they’re doing, you visit the construction site, admiring what they did and also being envious,” he said. “There’s no excuse anymore not to produce quality work.”

He is the first Pritzker laureate from Chile, and the fourth from Latin America, after Luis Barragán (1980), Oscar Niemeyer (1988), and Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2006).

But winning the Pritzker does not come with pressure to produce, Aravena said; rather, it gives him the freedom to experiment. “I guess from now on we don’t have to prove anything to anybody,” he said. “Now we feel even more encouraged to enter fields with an even higher risk of failure.”

“Rather than the responsibility or weight that such a prize could mean, I feel now lighter,” he added, “to be able to start running.”